Tuesday, November 25, 2008

For those of you who were wondering a bit about the process from here on and what happens when, this is somthing I took of another site and kind of outlines what will happen.

1) Homestudy (Once the social worker finishes it, She writes it up and it gets apporved by HOLT. We are considered to be officially waiting for a refurral.) This gets sent to Korea, they look at this when matching you with a child.2) File I600A with immigration (Will be sent with an offical copy of the Homestudy) This is the pre-approval for immagration and should be taking place in the month of December for us.3) Get fingerprinted for I600A4 (They call you and tell you when you have to come in for fingerprints.)4) Wait Wait Wait5)Get referral!!!!!! (which usually takes about a year on average but there are exceptions both ways) the child is usually around 6 mo. at time of referral.{Steps 6-12 usually take anywhere from 3-6 mo on average but there are exceptions that make it longer}6) receive legals for the specific child7) File I600 with immigration8) I600 approval goes to National Visa Center9) Receive Emmigration Permit (permission from the Korean government for our child to leave the county).10) Embassy requests packet of info from agency to complete visa (also known as P3)11) Get visa interview12) Get our travel call or escort date (we are not decided yet on what we will do and we have a while to think about it.)

It was kind of nice to have our homestudy on Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving since it made us get the house cleaned up before the holiday. It wasn't that messy to begin with but it was nice to have an earlier deadline so that we didn't have to do all the work just before my family came for Thanksgiving. Waiting for a homestudy is a bit more hectic than actually having one. She asked us general questions about eachother, our relationship, our children's personalities, why we were adopting, and about our extended family. They needed financial information and asked us questions about our jobs. Now that our part of the homestudy is done we just have to wait until we get our offical approval letter. Once we have this letter then the time starts to tick for our wait on our referral. She said to expect this sometime in December. So come next Christmas we just may know who is joining our family, although it may be a while longer until they come home.

Monday, November 17, 2008

All of our references were in on November 8th. Just a few days short of two months. We were hoping that they would have been in sooner but one got lost somewhere along the line and had to be redone and another just took a while.We received a phone message from our social worker on Saturday Nov. 15th. I finally caught up with her on the phone today and scheduled our home study for the afternoon of the 24th and the evening of the 25th. Each visit she will be here for two hours.She wanted to do it sooner and wants to get it completed right away. She suggested that she come tonight which would have been OK with me but John thought we should at least vacuum before she comes. I am sure we will be cleaning a bit more than that. Ethan came down with a bad cold today and had a bit of a rough night with a fever as well.So that means next week will be a busy one. Home study Monday and Tuesday and hosting Thanksgiving on Friday. We will also be getting our flu shots next week!At least the home study will be finished before Thanksgiving, which is nice!